Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday August 15, 2008 @12:33PM
from the aappropriate-allocation-of-prosecutorial-resources dept.

unassimilatible writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that German prosecutors will now only pursue larger-scale file sharers on the Internet, as they are tired of being the entertainment industry's profit collector. 'Prosecutors in a German state have announced they will refuse to entertain the majority of file-sharing lawsuits in [the] future. It appears that only commercial-scale copyright infringers will be pursued, with those sharing under 3,000 music tracks and 200 movies dropping under the prosecution radar.' And the money quote: 'It seems that the legal system in Germany has had enough of this "abuse" of the criminal law system for "civil" monetary gain.' If only an American politician would make this point. Why should taxpayers underwrite their government becoming enforcers for the entertainment industry? Then again, when you see how much politicians are being paid, an answer suggests itself."

Why? Bush should say something about how terrible it is, and do absolutely nothing. Let's face it - the entertainment industry is not exactly packed with Republicans these days. Republicans need to be about as friendly to the entertainment business as the entertainment business is to coal and nuclear. If the whole world and all of your allies want you to let your political enemies be driven out of business by too much copying, why should you really stop them? Come on liberals, copy away. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but its still a weakling compared to the greenback

Well, the actual actors, directors and set workers may lean democratic, but I posit that the actual owners lean heavily to the Republicans. You know, companies like General Electric and so on. Board members, people like that. The sort of people that see movies and songs as commodities, not as artworks. The people behind the RIAA and MPAA, who constantly lobby for longer copyright protections.

It isn't much different in newspapers either. The reporters may be more liberal and social-minded, but the owners oft

I agree. We either have a system or we don't. Allowing general exceptions because we don't like it is a slippery slope.
On the other hand, I think they may be onto something here. Right now a large number of people (dare I say majority) feel the RIAA is just a bully group picking on the weak. The RIAA will not run out of people to sue, they can find 100 people tomorrow based on these limits. But.. BUT! Instead of people feeling they are picking on the weak, they will see the defendant as stupid for sh

What about legitimate file-sharing, such as creative commons, open source, and free as in free beer content? And how exactly do you define "File sharing". File sharing can be done through anything as simple as e-mail or ftp.

The RIAA's been known to target the most trivial instances of file sharing, and in some cases you [afterdawn.com] don't [techdirt.com] even need a computer [metafilter.com]

I personally have taken a different course and just don't buy what isn't worth buying. I'll do without. I'm not entitled to every song I kind of like but not enough to pay for.

Which provokes the RIAA as much as (if not more than) "people using p2p software to copy movies, music and software with no plans to ever pay the producers for what they use." People who make illegal copies at least help proliferate their products and therefore increase popularity and sales of said products. People like you don't do anything at all for them.

The RIAA doesn't care how they get their money. Nor do they care what the actual reason is that they're not getting as much as they believe they deserve

There is an enormous population of people using p2p software to copy movies, music and software with no plans to ever pay the producers for what they use. This should at least be acknowledged.

An enormous population? No. That cannot be acknowledged until it has been proven. The RIAA, for example, claimed that billions of songs were being illegally downloaded a month. Billions, with a B. A couple of months later, they reported that their profits grew a few percent from the previous year.

I can easily picture there are people out there downloading stuff and never paying for it. But lots of people? No, I can't. If all the P2P traffic out there was really about avoiding paying money to producer

The anecdotal rate at which I was finding Kazaa (and thereby spyware) on customer computers a few years ago indicates there was a better than 50% chance that a home computer with a broadband connection was being used to get copyrighted media via P2P.

Okay. Correlate that with actual money not being spent.

Since we're using anecdotal evidence here, I'll throw some in on my own. I know lots of dudes that are fully capable of downloading movies, games, music, you name it. They know how. They have the means. Some of them even have a theater system set up so they can enjoy that content rather luxuriously. Of all those dudes, and I'm talking 20'ish here, only one of them actually avoids spending money on those things because he can get them on the net.

The criminal sanctions are the wrong instrument. Copyright infringement is a matter of civil enforcement, not criminal enforcement. You cannot spam the Staatsanwaltschaften with copyright infringement.

So what they do in Germany, they send the IP adress of a suppost pirate to the prosecuters, who investigate the matter. While doing this they ask the internet providers for the identity of the person who used that IP address at that time.In most cases, they stop investigating once they come to the conclusion that no crime was commited.

Now the lawyers of the recording industry get the opportunity to look into the files of the prosecuters, get the information of the suspected pirate and sue him in a civil case.

Yes, they do (and also their German version), but they need to get the names behind the IP addresses. So they start a criminal trial, ask the police for the IP data, then start their civil law suit and let the criminal case go to hell. That is exactly what this stuff is about. You should have RTFA.

In germany, the RIAA abuses the criminal courts to get the ID of file sharers. They file a criminal report on which the authorities have to act. Then they demand access to the records in order to obtain the identity of the "terrorist". Criminal charges are dropped in 99.9% of all cases, but the RIAA has the identity and files a civil suit.

Have you not familiarized yourself with the current criminal IP laws in the USA? The criminalization of intellectual property law - something heretofore dealt with in civil courts except in the most extreme circumstances - is a disturbing trend in the US in the last 10-12 years. And it's getting worse. Now there are bills in Congress to create IP police, akin to the DEA, whose sole job it is to enforce criminal IP laws at taxpayer expense. This is the role of law enforcemen

Yes, and if the english summaries of this were actually done properly, people wouldn't be confused like this. If you can read german, do yourself a favor and read up on this on a german website.

For a civil suit, you need to know who to sue. An IP address only won't fly for that in germany - you need identities. But the ISPs are not giving out customer details to private companies. So what the industry does is filing a criminal suit first, so the police has to investigate, subpoenaing the infringers identity from the ISP. Then, the criminal suit is retracted - as there has been no commercial infringment, so there's no success to be found there - but because of court documentation, the infringers name, address etc. are still known to the RIAAish organization. They then use this information for filing a civil suit.
The new policy closes this loophole. You could still be prosecuted for downloading even one song, but there is now pretty much no way to get your IP unless you're _probably_ guilty commercial copyright infringment. Where the line is to be drawn is upon the courts to decide. FYI, downloading an only very recently or not yet released movie _does_ probably count as commercial - as it probably hurts the commercial interested of the rightsholder.

Beginning next month, copyright holders can just ask ISPs directly for the address of filesharers, so they don't need the public prosecutor anymore. Until then, having the public prosecutor investigate copyright infringement was the only way to get the name and address of the filesharer. No case was actually pursued. It was always just a vehicle to get the necessary information for a civil suit (actually just a way to get people to sign cease-and-desist declarations and pay up: The civil suit also rarely goes to court).

There will be a new law which gives copyright holders the tools to request infringer user data directly from ISPs which are required to store it for some time. Before that, it was not possible to get this data without a criminal warrant due to personal data protection laws, and so an enormous case load resulted for the public prosecutors. They do not want to play along any longer for smaller cases where no criminal trial will ultimately result. Copyright holders are of course still eligible for compensation by infringers by means of a civil suit. This whole process has just been streamlined. That is all. No free passes for anybody.

The reason? They want to avoid liability for being sued over frivolous lawsuits. If Fair Use is inherently questionable, then they can sue anyone they want whenever they want without consequence while they stick ordinary people with huge legal fees and no chance of recovering them from the people who dragged them into court in the first place. The whole point, o

Why? Almost every foreign poster on this site refers to the US Government as if it were monolithic and parliamentarian in form, totally missing the federal form of government and the independence of the executive and the legislature.

Your defense for being an ignoramus is that other people are too? That's kinda dumb.

I've already seen it:This is akin to the local sheriff saying he will no longer prosecute muggings where the victim did not go to the hospital.

This equivocations seem to say that these people want *all* the laws enforced without any regard to a prioritizing by benefit to society.

The key they mentioned was "criminal law for monetary GAIN."

They are right in refusing to criminally prosecute citizens where no appreciable harm was incurred for the monetary enrichment of a single party. Its like watching a car speeding a little but otherwise safely and *NOT* pulling them over and giving them a ticket.

There isn't a single country in the world in which you would want all the laws enforced consistently.

He is saying that they derived these numbers from the assumption
that, on average, an audio file was worth 1 euro, and a movie file
was worth 15 euro, resulting in commercial damages of 3.000 euro each.

Furthermore, he states that in his jurisdiction
(the biggest one of three total in North-Rhine Westphalia),
there were around 25.000 cases related to copyright
infringement filed in court within the first half of 2008.

He is saying that in his experience, most of these cases
get filed to get at the identity of people behind IP addresses
in order to sue them for damages.

He's saying that network operators charge the prosecutors (that's him)
17 euro per hour for matching up IP addresses to people. They can do
this according to German law.

He also states that all these cases
add considerable overhead to their day-to-day operations because
they are binding a lot of their resources.

While he's saying that copyright infringement is to be considered
a criminal act, he also says that it is a lesser criminal act
than others.

The interviewer compares filesharing to consuming Cannabis, which
the interviewer says is being treated similarly. The interviewer says
that both copyright infringement and consuming Cannabis were primarily
done by younger people.

The chief ackknowledges the interviewer's remark that both of these
are primarily done by younger people. He says that juvenile behaviour
should not be criminalised in each and every case, and that focusing their
entire resources on such cases was out of proportion.

It's more likely a nice little Python script interacting with the prosecutor's office over XML-RPC, querying the DHCP/RADIUS logs, sending the data back to the prosecutor's PC and printing a (PDF) standard invoice over 17 EUR. Call it B2P (business-to-prosecutor interface, or rather bulk-to-prosecutor interface).

Amazing that the RIAA/MPAA don't "own" more of the laws in the US with their contribution record.
Democrats: $11,163,030
Republicans: $2,104,737
I had always assumed the "Law and Order" party (Republicans) would be the major force and benefactor of the industry. I'm going to have to re-think my support based on these numbers. Five to one contribution rate over the GOP is a pretty telling statistic against the Democrats..

"most" german attorneys came to the "understanding" that they would follow those guidelines, because they want to stopbeing abused.No attorney is bound to this understanding, so there is no safe haven.

Some attorneys in germany are/were very vivid on supporting the entertainment industry. Most attorneys got tired of being abused as simple information providers, because the attorneys mostly setteled the criminal cases with a fine and no judgement or really no judgement.

They should be going after and nailing to the wall anybody who makes copyrighted material available FOR PROFIT, regardless of the number of files. They should leave people who are just to stupid to configure their file sharing software properly alone. My local library makes thousands of CDs and DVDs available for copying (physical media, not over the 'net)... shouldn't they be prosecuted under German law?

come on people, its about distributing, not obtaining, it's ALWAYS about sharing, NEVER about downloading.

If you're going to rant at least make it technically accurate. With torrent clients, almost always when downloading you are also sharing. They are in fact realistically equivalent for 99% of file sharers.

But if you're not sharing everything at once, then they're not going to see you sharing that many unless they watch you for an extended period of time. I doubt that most people who share over 200 movies are sharing them all out at once. But then I have extremely limited experience with torrenting videos, so maybe that is how people do it.

No, but I doubt you can effectively actually send 200 movies concurrently. With a small minimum of effort each could keep say 150 "archive" vids and 30-40 "hot" vids shared which would let 30 people share 2200 vids with redunancy (2/movie) without anyone breaking any limits. Now instead take an actual hub of hundreds or thousands of people and 200 movies/person is practically no limit at all.

At 60Mbps, you could keep 200 torrents running at better than 30KB/sec. That's only 7 hours to download a 2-hour movie at the normal size that most people use with MPEG-4 compression.

Uh. you got 60M*bits*/s compared to 30 kilo*bytes*/s, try more like under 4kB/s. And that's assuming you serve one peer for each torrent, which is extremely unlikely. if we say a modest 5 peers/torrent you're below 1kB/s.

In OS, the plan was to transfer money (sub-cent fractions) from the bank's customers into a central account and let them aggregate. Ignoring plot holes like simply editing the account balance, money in this system can only be in one account at a time. It can go to Peter & friends, the customers, the bank, or the void, but not to more than one at once.

File sharing is making clones, at near-zero cost of something that can very well exist in multiple places at

Your argument would actually have merit if there were a private organization (say, the Vehicle Owner's Association of Germany or some such) that was filing suit against thousands upon thousands of individuals with at best flimsy evidence. Furthermore, if numbered among their victims were people that were bedridden, paralyzed, legless or otherwise physically unable to drive a car, and if they continued to pursue those cases when clear evidence was presented that the person in question could not possibly, under any conditions, be the perpetrator then yes, you might have a point.

Court time is a limited resource, and prosectors in Germany are making the point that it shouldn't be spent on hundreds or thousands of frivolous lawsuits. Not all crimes are the same, and some "crimes" have no business in court, particularly when they're only there as part of a multinational private-sector terror campaign having nothing to do with redress of grievance.

In other news, German prosecutors annnounced today that they will only be prosecuting auto thefts when more than 200 are committed, and car break-ins when 3000 are committed. "Our goal is to prevent organized crime", said their spokesperson, "we don't care about the occasional junkie or joy-rider."

Ok, I admit that the above paragraph is a bit down the slippery slope, but the point is that the slope exists....

Do you really think the police can afford to spend ten effective salary-years on every car theft investigation? No. They cannot. So they use artificial (and sometimes arbitrary) means to limit the resources put into each case. But when a 'ring of carjackers' aka: a group of professionals, or 'organized crime', you bet your bippie they pull out all the stops to try and bust it. Their response to the **AA is no further down the slope then they already have to go, as like it or not, their pool of resource

And whenever someone uses this stupid statement I always like to point out that if this was truly the case, why do the geeks get mad when someone takes the code to Linux and uses it in an appliance without posting modified source? Can't have it both ways.. sorry.

I'm not trying to have it both ways, and you're reading something that I just didn't write. I never said that copyright violation was a good thing. I just said that the analogy to car theft is stupid. And it is.

And whenever someone uses this stupid statement I always like to point out that if this was truly the case, why do the geeks get mad when someone takes the code to Linux and uses it in an appliance without posting modified source? Can't have it both ways.. sorry.

And we don't call it theft now do we? Copyright Infringement != theft. You want to label illegal downloading Copyright Infringement, do so. Don't call it theft.

In both the case of the car being stolen and the 100 million dollar movie being pirated

The point of piracy, beyond just "I want it now!", is the endgame is nobody gets to profit from digital media. Period. It is "shared" immediately with (maybe) one sale. From then on, it is free.

Sure, for a little while the DVDs will still be on the shelf at WalMart and available for rental at Blockbuster. But why? If everyone has a high-bandwidth Internet connection and knows the materials are available for downloading without paying, why would anyone in their right mind still go to the store and pay?

That's nice, but there's a reason why the slippery slope is a fallacy. And this is a pretty good example of why.

Copyright law isn't supposed to be enforced by the government, it's supposed to be enforced by the owner of the rights to the work. The limit to the government's responsibilities is ensuring that the verdict be enforce subject to appeal.

In the case of car break ins or thefts, that's a criminal matter, it's a property crime, and there's a very clear indication of who was hurt. Additionally, there's

Excellent, so you fall under the RIAA's "Senile Grandmother, Deaf-Mute, and the Unborn" clause. Your subpoena is in the mail.

I hear a lot of deaf-mutes pirate MP3s and enjoy the beats which they can feel through the floor. The RIAA has just demanded that Gallaudet University hand over the names of students from IP addresses.

Full disclosure: I've never, TTBOMK, either sent or deliberately aquired any copyrighted work without proper consent. On the one occasion in which my copyrighted work was posted without my consent the poster - who had received a version withgout copyright notice attached - happily complied upon the first request.

Excellent, so you fall under the RIAA's "Senile Grandmother, Deaf-Mute, and the Unborn" clause. Your subpoena is in the mail.

Why does P so readily make the assumption that to make use of the net, you have to steal intellectual property?Has it come to the point that for some people the primary purpose of the net is for theft - and if you aren't stealing you therefore must be in some manner disabled or non-fuctioning?

How long before we see net communities where everyone shares 2,999 songs and 199 movies?

Well, considering the article is only about one state in Germany, I wouldn't expect that any time soon. Also, once people started doing that in an organized fashion, the prosecutors would probably go after them anyway, since the damage would be above the threshold.

Ok, so you have this giant store of songs and movies but only one seeder. That's going to suck.

The real functionality of stuff like P2P ware and BT is that you have communities sharing these as needed. Single "server" type of distribution is fine only if you have boat loads of bandwidth and the facilities to keep it going 24/7.

I'm sure there are many who do keep it their stuff up all the time but your standard home connection doesn't handle scores of leachers too well.

That's probably something that can only be tested in court. Per the interview it's "personal, non-commercial use," so charging money per file (a la allofmp3) wouldn't fly, but somebody might try it by collecting donations only to cover costs.

They appear to be assigning the damage of trading one song at 1.5 Euro, no matter how many times that song is traded -- so you might be able to get away with it under the new guidelines, at least for a short time. Loopholes like this tend to be closed.

"In the U.S., copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, although I think that may be different in Europe...?"

Not sure what you mean there. It's pretty well known that copyright violation carries both civil and criminal penalties in the US. You're correct that most people reading this would be liable for civil penalties at most, but it's misleading to state that there's no criminal copyright infringement in the US.

That's why you see that FBI warning before movies on DVDs -- yeah, I know

In Germany it can be both. If the piracy has a commercial background, it can end up in criminal court. But for cases with few files and more on a personal scale, it is highly unlikely to end up there. A criminal case without significant damage often ends up being closed before going before a judge. Then there is the way to seek damages in civil court.

Why those simple cases get into the realm of a prosecutor is rather simple, you need a way to turn the captured IP addresses into a street address. And that is